Abstract
PurposeParenting behaviours—including the extent to which parents are protective, hostile, or caring—likely impacts whether a child develops a sense of vulnerability that carries forward into adulthood. Ideas of vulnerability are a contributory factor to the occurrence of paranoia. Our aim was to assess whether there is an association between specific parenting behaviours and paranoia.MethodWe examined cross-sectional associations of parenting and paranoia in an epidemiologically representative cohort of 10,148 adolescents (National Comorbidity Survey-Adolescents; NCS-A) and a second dataset of 1286 adults in Oxfordshire. Further, a network analysis was conducted with paranoia, parenting behaviours, and cognitive-affective variables (compassion, self-esteem, anxiety, and depression). Overprotectiveness, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and amount of care were assessed in mothers and fathers separately.ResultsNearly all parenting variables were significantly associated with paranoia, with parental verbal and physical abuse showing the largest associations. For example, the odds of reporting paranoia was over four times higher for those in the adult sample reporting a lot of paternal verbal abuse, compared to those reporting none (OR = 4.12, p < 0.001, CI 2.47–6.85). Network analyses revealed high interconnectivity between paranoia, parenting behaviours, and cognitive-affective variables. Of the parenting variables, paranoia most strongly interacted with paternal abuse and maternal lack of care.ConclusionThere are associations between participants’ self-reported experiences of parental behaviours and paranoia. Despite being associated with paranoia, cognitive-affective variables did not appear to mediate the relationship between parenting and paranoia, which is surprising. What might explain the link therefore remains to be determined.
Highlights
Paranoia exists on a spectrum of severity in the general population: many people have a few paranoid thoughts and a few people have many [1,2,3]
Associations between parenting behaviour and paranoia were first tested in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A) [35] and in a new survey conducted to assess the key variables in greater depth
In the NCS-A participant group, reporting ‘a lot’ of maternal or paternal overprotectiveness was significantly associated with having a higher likelihood of reporting paranoia
Summary
Paranoia exists on a spectrum of severity in the general population: many people have a few paranoid thoughts and a few people have many [1,2,3]. It is possible to learn about the clinical disorder by studying milder variants in the general population. A contributory causal factor in the occurrence of paranoia is negative beliefs about the self [4]. Negative views of the self-engender a sense of vulnerability that paranoia builds upon. How do these negative views of the self-develop? An obvious potential contributory factor that could affect views of the self is parenting behaviour. This paper investigates for the first time the association between specific aspects of parenting, cognitive-affective processes, and paranoia
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